5/20/09

False Memory Syndrome

Four artists respond to Temple Bar Gallery +
Studios history, archive and place

In 2013, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios
celebrates its 30th Anniversary. The organisation was founded
in 1983 by Jenny Haughton, who invited a group of artists to claim space within
a semi derelict factory building in Temple Bar. Through the vision and
determination of a number of individuals, over the intervening years the
building was transformed into a purpose built complex of artists work spaces
and a gallery. TBG+S has been a site where countless new projects, practices,
friendships and careers have been created over the last 30 years , and at the
same time much has been lost. Memories remain in the minds of the artists who
worked and continue to work at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. Paper files have
been discarded, or archived at the National Irish Visual Arts Library. Computer
files have been left on old hard drives, never to be recovered.

Michael Boran’s work ‘Far and Away’ comes from the artists own archive. Michael Boran is an artist who
has been a studio member at TBG+S since 1991. Two years before TBG+S opened its
renovated building, the area was used as a stand in for Boston in the 1890s for
the film ‘Far and Away’. Boran’s photographs are a curious mixture of document
and fiction. In choosing this brief interlude from the history of the area
Boran captures some of the architectural facts and sense of the area from which
TBG+S emerged, yet it is overlaid with false clues to somewhere else, a more
remote past which strangely prefigures touristic expectations and Mary Harney’s
famous signalling of “Boston not Berlin” as a development model. As he points
out, ‘false history was quickly to become the norm in Temple Bar, as pubs
opened with signs proclaiming “established in 1870” , the installation of cobblestones
and the general repackaging of the area as a themed destination’. In Boran’s
photographs, past and present merge in a strange palimpsest. We get a glimpse
of competing pasts and a nostalgia for a more recent time when the possibility
of a new cultural quarter in the city was still a blank canvas.